The Southeastern Conference has had unprecedented success in basketball in the 2017-2018 season.

Only two teams in the conference have a losing record, and the conference has had six teams this year in the AP Top 25 at some point, although not at the same time.

The SEC also ranks fourth in overall efficiency according to KenPom, behind the Big 12, ACC and Big East conferences.

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According to ESPN’s Bracketology, the SEC is expected to have eight teams in the NCAA Tournament. Since the NCAA Tournament’s inception in 1942, the SEC has never had more than six teams in the tournament.

The SEC also won the Big 12-SEC Challenge for the first time in the challenge’s beginning, secured with UK’s comeback win over West Virginia in Morgantown.

Several teams in the conference this year have also outperformed expectations. In the preseason, many media outlets had listed Tennessee to finish near the bottom of the conference. Currently, the Volunteers sit at 23-7, and 13-5 in the SEC. They finished co-champions in the conference and have been an AP Top 25 team for several weeks.

“I mean you look at it – this is the best basketball league in the country,” Tennessee head coach Rick Barnes said after his team beat UK in Rupp Arena on Feb. 6. “And I don’t know why people won’t own up to that. In one week you can go from first to last, somewhere in between, from 10 to four probably, because everyone is so bunched up.”

Just like the Volunteers, Bruce Pearl’s Auburn Tigers have excelled, reaching for the 1-seed in the SEC Tournament, the best record in the conference and several weeks in the Top 10. They were expected to be a moderately talented team with decent guard play, and not much else. They’ve evolved into a team that’s captured a share of the SEC regular season title for the first time since 1999.

For the Cats specifically, their record says everything necessary about this year’s degree of difficulty in the conference. The last two times UK finished fourth in the conference, the team had fewer than 20 wins on the year. This season, the Cats finished the regular season 21-10, with eight of their 10 losses coming in conference play.

With such a heavy conference schedule, the Cats had a strength of schedule that was ranked in the Top 5 nationally. SEC games have been more difficult for this blue-blood team than ever before.

The Cats will have claw their way to get their 32nd SEC Tournament championship, something they haven’t often had to do in the past.